I recently mentioned Tanya Grotter, Dmitri Yemets' Russian "cultural reply" to Harry Potter. I've been reading Wikipedia on the subject, and was interested to find behind this a long-running story of Russian adaptations of classic Western literature - not mere translations but Russification to adapt to local cultural flavour. We have Tolstoy's Buratino (based on Pinocchio); The Wizard of Emerald City, Alexander Volkov's adaptation of L. Frank Baum's Oz mythos; Nabokov's Anya in Wonderland (see Nabokov as Translator for background); and Boriz Zahoder's adaptation of Winnie the Pooh (see the Zahoder page at the Russian State Children's Library). These works have acquired classic status within their genre: the Volkov adaptations have even come back into English and inspired the works of March Laumer (brother of SF author Keith Laumer - more about him soon). I find it hard to conclude JK Rowling's successful litigation to prevent Western publication of Tanya Grotter to be of long-term benefit to literature; Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass looks an interesting book that could enlighten Western readers about Russian mythology and life in modern Russia.
You can, incidentally, with a little Google-Fu, find a detailed English-language analysis of the the first three Grotter books in Tanya Grotter: a Russian Harry Potter Knock-Off or Parody?, Mark Hooker's conference address reprinted in Selected Papers from Nimbus-2003 Compendium. If you go to the link above and search the book internally for "Tanya Grotter" (use the Google Books "search in this book", in the right-hand sidebar) you can track through the article page by page (ie pp75-104).
Hooker ultimately concludes that the relationship between Harry Potter and Tanya Grotter is akin to that of Gone with the Wind and Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, a retelling from a slave perspective (marketed and legally defended as a parody, though it obviously isn't one in the usual comic sense of the word). A legal dispute on very similar grounds to that of Emets vs Rowling concluded as an out-of-court settlement - Settlement reached over 'Wind Done Gone' - enabling the book to be published. The US climate and scenario is, however, rather different, in that The Wind Done Gone was "home-grown" and had strong expert support for its cultural perspective; also, a block on publication raised First Amendment issues of "unlawful prior restraint".
Addendum, 12 Oct 2008: I just ran into another example of a retelling of a novel still in copyright, Pia Pera's Lo's Diary 2001 , Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita retold from the point of Lolita herself, portraying her as a sadistic monster: see Salon Books' The Nymphet Strikes Back and Nerve.com's On a Book Entitled Lo's Diary (Dmitri Nabokov's commentary). Despite considerable legal wrangling, a settlement was reached between Pera and Nabokov's estate - Pact Reached on U.S. Edition of 'Lolita' Retelling (Peter Applebone, New York Times, June 17, 1999). It shows that such accommodations are perfectly feasible.
- Ray
Saturday, 8 September 2007
Tuesday, 4 September 2007
50 underrated novels
Interesting list from this Sunday's Guardian: How did we miss these? (see also Part 2). Fifty contemporary writers recommend "brilliant but underrated novels that deserve a second chance to shine". I'm pleased to see that two I recommended here are on the list: Alasdair Gray's Lanark and Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. But I'm ashamed to admit that I only recognised about six of the remaining titles, and three of those because they'd been adapted for film or TV.
- Ray
- Ray
Thursday, 30 August 2007
... and roads not taken
The Internet Archive, despite its usefulness, seems to be an under-used resource. For the curious or sneaky, its Wayback Machine is a handy tool for finding past versions of defunct or revised websites. But there's also a large collection of open source material, including out-of-copyright texts (which I've cited here before) and even feature films.
Alexander Korda's Things to Come is one example. I admit I've never particularly liked it - the screenplay, written by HG Wells himself, is very preachy and stylised - but visually it's remarkable for its time. The source book, The Shape of Things to Come, is also online: not a novel but an imaginary historical account from the early 1900s to 2100. It's presented through the device of a diplomat using the then-fashionable techniques of JW Dunne - see An Experiment with Time - dreaming a history book written in 2106.
The Shape of Things to Come is well worth reading, in parts (I personally find Well's idealistic final section about world recovery through a rational world state tedious and unlikely). But it's remarkable astute in its prediction for the 1930s; Wells was very nearly right in his date for the onset of WW2, and completely right in recognition of the importance of aerial warfare and the submarine missile deterrent.
He is, however, very influenced by World War 1. His WW2 starts with a similar pivotal killing to that of Archduke Ferdinand: in this case a young Nazi shoots a Jewish rail passenger on the mistaken assumption that the latter is making faces at him (he is really struggling with stuck false teeth). Wells imagines gas warfare, important in WW1, as the most destructive aspect of WW2 (something that, partly through the Geneva Protocol and partly through fortunate circumstance 1, didn't happen in reality).
Wells' WW2 continues until 1949, followed by a pandemic fever (akin to the post-WW1 influenza pandemic) peaking in the mid-1950s. The resultant Balkanized Europe and an America caught up in ritualistic denial of its collapse, described in the Europe in 1960 and America in Liquidation chapters, are a very dark and modern post-apocalyptic vision, unlike the somewhat idyllic post-civilisation England envisaged by the Victorian pastoralist Richard Jefferies in After London.
The Germans had G-series nerve agents, but didn't use them on the mistaken assumption that the Allies also did.
- Ray
Alexander Korda's Things to Come is one example. I admit I've never particularly liked it - the screenplay, written by HG Wells himself, is very preachy and stylised - but visually it's remarkable for its time. The source book, The Shape of Things to Come, is also online: not a novel but an imaginary historical account from the early 1900s to 2100. It's presented through the device of a diplomat using the then-fashionable techniques of JW Dunne - see An Experiment with Time - dreaming a history book written in 2106.
The Shape of Things to Come is well worth reading, in parts (I personally find Well's idealistic final section about world recovery through a rational world state tedious and unlikely). But it's remarkable astute in its prediction for the 1930s; Wells was very nearly right in his date for the onset of WW2, and completely right in recognition of the importance of aerial warfare and the submarine missile deterrent.
He is, however, very influenced by World War 1. His WW2 starts with a similar pivotal killing to that of Archduke Ferdinand: in this case a young Nazi shoots a Jewish rail passenger on the mistaken assumption that the latter is making faces at him (he is really struggling with stuck false teeth). Wells imagines gas warfare, important in WW1, as the most destructive aspect of WW2 (something that, partly through the Geneva Protocol and partly through fortunate circumstance 1, didn't happen in reality).
Wells' WW2 continues until 1949, followed by a pandemic fever (akin to the post-WW1 influenza pandemic) peaking in the mid-1950s. The resultant Balkanized Europe and an America caught up in ritualistic denial of its collapse, described in the Europe in 1960 and America in Liquidation chapters, are a very dark and modern post-apocalyptic vision, unlike the somewhat idyllic post-civilisation England envisaged by the Victorian pastoralist Richard Jefferies in After London.
The Germans had G-series nerve agents, but didn't use them on the mistaken assumption that the Allies also did.
- Ray
Roads...
I'm constantly surprised at what Google is doing. If you haven't tried Google Earth, do, especially now that it has Google Sky. Meanwhile, Google Maps continues to increase coverage: Topsham now has high-res throughout. I see also from Google Blogoscoped that Google has begun, for some US locations, to add a Street View option where you can view locations from ground level (more systematically than the Ordnance Survey Geograph project - which is excellent but very much dependent on where the volunteer contributors felt was photogenic; see its Topsham coverage).
The idea of a ground level photographic map isnn't new: Blogoscoped has an interesting post, Photo-Auto Maps (1907), about a century-old Rand McNally travel guide with images to help drivers recognise important turns. The quoted poster, however, makes a slightly strange assumption that this idea was down to conventional road maps not having yet been developed. Road maps actually long pre-date cars. A few lovely examples: Paterson's British Itinerary, 1785, probably the first pocket-sized road map and gazetteer; the Gough Map, 1306, the oldest surviving road map specifically of Great Britain; and Peutinger's Tabula, aka Tabula Peutingeriana, a 12th century copy of a 4th century road map of the Roman Empire.
Here, at the University of Applied Sciences, Augsburg, is a full scan of the Peutinger map - and here's the British section. In the latter, there are signs of topographical and linguistic garbling: Dorchester isn't east of Southampton. You can identify the locations via the placename index at Thomas G. Ikins' Roman Map of Britain site. - Ray
The idea of a ground level photographic map isnn't new: Blogoscoped has an interesting post, Photo-Auto Maps (1907), about a century-old Rand McNally travel guide with images to help drivers recognise important turns. The quoted poster, however, makes a slightly strange assumption that this idea was down to conventional road maps not having yet been developed. Road maps actually long pre-date cars. A few lovely examples: Paterson's British Itinerary, 1785, probably the first pocket-sized road map and gazetteer; the Gough Map, 1306, the oldest surviving road map specifically of Great Britain; and Peutinger's Tabula, aka Tabula Peutingeriana, a 12th century copy of a 4th century road map of the Roman Empire.
Here, at the University of Applied Sciences, Augsburg, is a full scan of the Peutinger map - and here's the British section. In the latter, there are signs of topographical and linguistic garbling: Dorchester isn't east of Southampton. You can identify the locations via the placename index at Thomas G. Ikins' Roman Map of Britain site. - Ray
Thursday, 23 August 2007
Creative alteration
Pardon the absence: busy month, and it's our Town Fayre Week here.
Among those who like books, it's generally sacrilege to cut them up or write on them. It certainly made me wince when I first read of an arts-and-crafts trend in altering books - see Transforming books into objets d'art and Books rebound - but the latter article makes the fair point that many books are trashed by libraries and publishers anyway.
There are even more honourable exceptions. A thread at the Giornale Nuovo weblog just reminded me of Tom Phillips' remarkable work, A Humument. For this work, which is continually under revision with successive editions, Phillips took William Hurrell Mallock's little known 1892 novel, A Human Document (itself already considerably experimental for its period) and creatively overpainted it, leaving fragments of words and phrases that form a surreal new text.
The protagonist's surname, for instance, is Toge (obtained when the words "altogether" and "together" appear) and the introductory first page is reduced to "The following sing I a book. / a book of art / of mind and art / that which he hid / reveal I". The official site, www.humument.com contains an introduction, gallery and a number of essays on the project and the original novel. Tom Phillips' website carries a full sets of scans of the first edition in 1970.
I also encountered at Giornale Nuovo the work of an artist I didn't know about: Brian Dettmer. Like Phillips, Dettmer reworks books, but in three dimensions. Using surgical instriuments, he cuts down through the layers to create intricate carvings revealing words and images at different depths (it recalls the common anecdote about Michelangelo; that he viewed his sculptures as hidden inside the stone, waiting to be cut out). More examples here and here. - Ray
Among those who like books, it's generally sacrilege to cut them up or write on them. It certainly made me wince when I first read of an arts-and-crafts trend in altering books - see Transforming books into objets d'art and Books rebound - but the latter article makes the fair point that many books are trashed by libraries and publishers anyway.
There are even more honourable exceptions. A thread at the Giornale Nuovo weblog just reminded me of Tom Phillips' remarkable work, A Humument. For this work, which is continually under revision with successive editions, Phillips took William Hurrell Mallock's little known 1892 novel, A Human Document (itself already considerably experimental for its period) and creatively overpainted it, leaving fragments of words and phrases that form a surreal new text.
The protagonist's surname, for instance, is Toge (obtained when the words "altogether" and "together" appear) and the introductory first page is reduced to "The following sing I a book. / a book of art / of mind and art / that which he hid / reveal I". The official site, www.humument.com contains an introduction, gallery and a number of essays on the project and the original novel. Tom Phillips' website carries a full sets of scans of the first edition in 1970.
I also encountered at Giornale Nuovo the work of an artist I didn't know about: Brian Dettmer. Like Phillips, Dettmer reworks books, but in three dimensions. Using surgical instriuments, he cuts down through the layers to create intricate carvings revealing words and images at different depths (it recalls the common anecdote about Michelangelo; that he viewed his sculptures as hidden inside the stone, waiting to be cut out). More examples here and here. - Ray
Saturday, 21 July 2007
Tanya Grotter
Rather than make the obligatory comment about the release of the last Harry Potter novel, I thought I'd mention a more interesting bibliographic story: the case of Tanya Grotter.
The Tanya Grotter series is a very popular Russian clone of Harry Potter by the best-selling author Dmitri Yemets. There is no doubting the origin, and Yemets is open about it: introduced in Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass, Tanya is an orphan with magical powers, brought up by an abusive foster-family, who gets to go to a wizarding school, etc etc. You won't currently get to read it in translation because in 2003 lawyers for JK Rowling and Time Warner successfully brought a cease-and-desist action to prevent the release of a Dutch translation, and this is likely to be the fate of translation into other languages (see Pravda's J.K. Rowling law firm sued Russian publishing house Eksmo on plagiarism allegation and the BBC's Rowling blocks Grotter release). Rowling's lawyers argued that the Grotter books violated copyright, and Yemets and his Moscow-based publishers, Eksmo, were unsuccessful in defending it as a parody. The latter is permitted under copyright, which is why Michael Gerber's Barry Trotter series is allowed.
On the face of it, this sounds like a cut-and-dried copyright case. But Maureen O'Brien, a blogger in the USA, wrote a deal at the time about the Tanya Grotter series, suggesting that it has been misrepresented. According to Defending Tanya Grotter, the case failed to address the point that the Grotter series is not a parody (in the sense of an extended joke) but a contrafakt: a form of literature that retells a story in a different genre. Compare "contrafactum", the same concept applied to music. Maureen gives the particular examples of Sharon Shinn's Jenna Starborn and Pat Murphy's There and back again, respectively SF retellings of Jane Eyre and The Hobbit. The latter is a particularly significant precedent, as The Hobbit is still in copyright.
As described in Maureen's review , Tanya Grotter has structural similarities to Harry Potter, but is so deeply adapted to a Russian setting that, Maureen argues, it amounts to a different work (or, as Yemets put it, a "cultural reply" to the Potter series). For instance, Tanya doesn't sleep in a broom cupboard but a loggia, a glazed balcony (freezing in winter, sweltering in summer) characteristic of Russian apartments. The magical elements are rooted in Russian folklore, such as Baba Yaga and Rusalki, and general Russian culture such as the works of Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov's Night on Bald Mountain. You can read about some of the characters at another of Maureen O'Brien's postings, A little more measured response.....
None of these subtleties came out at the Dutch court sessions, and few commentators outside Russia bothered to investigate (news items just reported the similarities and assumed the copyright breach to be clear-cut). One exception was Tim Wu at Slate.com - Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright - who argued that the freedom to create derivative works is actually beneficial to the literary market. There have been no attempts to market a translation since then.
- Ray
Addendum: I've commented on this further in a later post, More Russification / Wind Done Gone. - Ray
The Tanya Grotter series is a very popular Russian clone of Harry Potter by the best-selling author Dmitri Yemets. There is no doubting the origin, and Yemets is open about it: introduced in Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass, Tanya is an orphan with magical powers, brought up by an abusive foster-family, who gets to go to a wizarding school, etc etc. You won't currently get to read it in translation because in 2003 lawyers for JK Rowling and Time Warner successfully brought a cease-and-desist action to prevent the release of a Dutch translation, and this is likely to be the fate of translation into other languages (see Pravda's J.K. Rowling law firm sued Russian publishing house Eksmo on plagiarism allegation and the BBC's Rowling blocks Grotter release). Rowling's lawyers argued that the Grotter books violated copyright, and Yemets and his Moscow-based publishers, Eksmo, were unsuccessful in defending it as a parody. The latter is permitted under copyright, which is why Michael Gerber's Barry Trotter series is allowed.
On the face of it, this sounds like a cut-and-dried copyright case. But Maureen O'Brien, a blogger in the USA, wrote a deal at the time about the Tanya Grotter series, suggesting that it has been misrepresented. According to Defending Tanya Grotter, the case failed to address the point that the Grotter series is not a parody (in the sense of an extended joke) but a contrafakt: a form of literature that retells a story in a different genre. Compare "contrafactum", the same concept applied to music. Maureen gives the particular examples of Sharon Shinn's Jenna Starborn and Pat Murphy's There and back again, respectively SF retellings of Jane Eyre and The Hobbit. The latter is a particularly significant precedent, as The Hobbit is still in copyright.
As described in Maureen's review , Tanya Grotter has structural similarities to Harry Potter, but is so deeply adapted to a Russian setting that, Maureen argues, it amounts to a different work (or, as Yemets put it, a "cultural reply" to the Potter series). For instance, Tanya doesn't sleep in a broom cupboard but a loggia, a glazed balcony (freezing in winter, sweltering in summer) characteristic of Russian apartments. The magical elements are rooted in Russian folklore, such as Baba Yaga and Rusalki, and general Russian culture such as the works of Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov's Night on Bald Mountain. You can read about some of the characters at another of Maureen O'Brien's postings, A little more measured response.....
None of these subtleties came out at the Dutch court sessions, and few commentators outside Russia bothered to investigate (news items just reported the similarities and assumed the copyright breach to be clear-cut). One exception was Tim Wu at Slate.com - Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright - who argued that the freedom to create derivative works is actually beneficial to the literary market. There have been no attempts to market a translation since then.
- Ray
Addendum: I've commented on this further in a later post, More Russification / Wind Done Gone. - Ray
Thursday, 19 July 2007
Small talk
Cecil Torr's Small Talk at Wreyland is a book that's constantly popular around here.
Torr, who lived from 1857-1928, was an interesting polymath. Described by his Times obituary for Thursday, Dec 20, 1928 as "a finely intellectual English country gentleman", he was the son of a solicitor, who was educated at Harrow and Trinity, Cambridge, then briefly took up law. But then he inherited the family estate at Wreyland, Lustleigh, and not needing to work for a living, spent the rest of his life in the duties of a country squire, travel, and scholarship. He wrote well-regarded books on the antiquities of Rhodes, ancient naval architecture and his own theory about Hannibal's route over the Alps.
In addition to these, he wrote the three-volume Small Talk series. The Times describes them as about "first of all (though he did not know it) Cecil Torr, next about Wreyland in the past and present, and then about subjects so diverse and so many that few readers (and no reviewer) could resist the fun of seeing how incongruous a list could be made out of them". I won't even try - but the flavour is, in fact, that of a wide-ranging weblog (well beyond the "Devon interest" into which it's commonly categorised).
There has been a recent reprint, but the books are old enough to be out of copyright in the USA, and all three volumes are available on the Internet Archive: Volume 1 / Volume 2 / Volume 3. They are greatly worth exploring. His more specialist works are also archived (here), including Xenophon's Expedition of Cyrus (1835), Rhodes in Ancient Times (1885), Ancient Ships (1894), Memphis and Mycenae; an examination of Egyptian chronology and its application to the early history of Greece (1896) and Hannibal crosses the Alps (1924).
- Ray
Torr, who lived from 1857-1928, was an interesting polymath. Described by his Times obituary for Thursday, Dec 20, 1928 as "a finely intellectual English country gentleman", he was the son of a solicitor, who was educated at Harrow and Trinity, Cambridge, then briefly took up law. But then he inherited the family estate at Wreyland, Lustleigh, and not needing to work for a living, spent the rest of his life in the duties of a country squire, travel, and scholarship. He wrote well-regarded books on the antiquities of Rhodes, ancient naval architecture and his own theory about Hannibal's route over the Alps.
In addition to these, he wrote the three-volume Small Talk series. The Times describes them as about "first of all (though he did not know it) Cecil Torr, next about Wreyland in the past and present, and then about subjects so diverse and so many that few readers (and no reviewer) could resist the fun of seeing how incongruous a list could be made out of them". I won't even try - but the flavour is, in fact, that of a wide-ranging weblog (well beyond the "Devon interest" into which it's commonly categorised).
There has been a recent reprint, but the books are old enough to be out of copyright in the USA, and all three volumes are available on the Internet Archive: Volume 1 / Volume 2 / Volume 3. They are greatly worth exploring. His more specialist works are also archived (here), including Xenophon's Expedition of Cyrus (1835), Rhodes in Ancient Times (1885), Ancient Ships (1894), Memphis and Mycenae; an examination of Egyptian chronology and its application to the early history of Greece (1896) and Hannibal crosses the Alps (1924).
- Ray
Lanark
Via the community weblog MetaFilter: the official website of the Glaswegian artist and writer Alasdair Gray. For those who don't know Gray, his most famous work is the novel Lanark. It follows twin narratives of the semi-autobiographical Duncan Thaw, an unhappy asthmatic artist; and his alter ego Lanark, an amnesic man who finds himself in Unthank, a Glasgow-like dystopian city.
Lanark's structure is unusual: its four books are arranged in the order Three, One, Two, Four. It's rich in literary allusions: Gray includes a whole chapter listing and analysing the varous "plagiarisms" (the whole structure for instance, can be viewed as a diffuse plagiarism of Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies). Postmodern literature? Fantasy? Social satire? The definitive novel on the Scottish condition? Probably all of them.
Gray explains some of the background to it and some of his other works to Mark Axelrod at An Epistolary Interview, Mostly with Alasdair Gray. Also online, Canongate Press reprints Gray's article How Lanark grew - in Alasdair Gray's words, which is included with the Canongate Classic edition. There's much more, including examples of Gray's art (he illutstrates his own works), at the unofficial website, Lanark 1982. - Ray
Lanark's structure is unusual: its four books are arranged in the order Three, One, Two, Four. It's rich in literary allusions: Gray includes a whole chapter listing and analysing the varous "plagiarisms" (the whole structure for instance, can be viewed as a diffuse plagiarism of Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies). Postmodern literature? Fantasy? Social satire? The definitive novel on the Scottish condition? Probably all of them.
Gray explains some of the background to it and some of his other works to Mark Axelrod at An Epistolary Interview, Mostly with Alasdair Gray. Also online, Canongate Press reprints Gray's article How Lanark grew - in Alasdair Gray's words, which is included with the Canongate Classic edition. There's much more, including examples of Gray's art (he illutstrates his own works), at the unofficial website, Lanark 1982. - Ray
Tuesday, 10 July 2007
Puzzling
Current reading: Alan Delgado's Have you forgotten yet? Between the Two World Wars. While this covers major national issues such as the General Strike, the Abdication and the Mosleyites. But it has its share of the small peculiarities of the era. 1924, for instance, saw a peak in a long-running craze for "Put and take", a gambling game using a six-sided top (one not so different from a dreidl and any number of similar devices, such as the "teetotum", going back centuries). That it had been a gambling device explains a memory from my childhood: how my grandmother reacted quite angrily when I got a yellow plastic put-and-take top as the toy from a Christmas cracker.
Another innovation of the 1920s was the publication of the first crossword puzzles in Britain (they had existed in the USA since the Liverpool-born editor Arthur Wynne introduced them to New York World in 1913). The first Sunday Express one in 1924 was a 7x7 non-cryptic effort that seems rather feeble by current standards; early puzzles also tended to go for densely interlocked grids of checked letters (in the style of the current "smallest, hardest crossword" format) but the familiar modern format and cryptic puzzles rapidly developed, notably via the poet and scholar Edward Powys Mathers (aka Torquemada).
I didn't realise until recently that there's a deal of philosophy behind crossword compilation. Torquemada is remembered as a great exponent and founder of the cryptic format, but many of his clues are imperfect by modern standards of clue-setting. Some were not even cryptic, in the crossword sense, just obscure general knowledge like completing literary quotations ("Chicken-skin, delicate, white, Painted by -- Vanloo").
A further problem relates to the logical basis, an idea codified by Torquemada's successor in 1939, Ximenes (Derrick Somerset Macnutt). Ximenes set the standard for the symmetric grid and the typical density of checked vs. unchecked letters (checked are the ones where words cross), as well as fairness of clues: no misdirection, guesswork, jumps of illogic, or breaching of the separation between the "definition" and "subsidiary indication" that comprise the clue. See Ximenean clueing and More thoughts on Ximenean clueing. Some puzzle setters such as the Guardian's Araucaria go against this convention; the rightness or wrongness of this is a matter of debate in crossword fandom.
If this kind of thing interests you, there's a lot more at Crosswords by Ximenes page (from which some of the above links come). The Fifteen squared weblog is a good stepping stone into the online crossword enthusiasts' circuit.
- Ray
Another innovation of the 1920s was the publication of the first crossword puzzles in Britain (they had existed in the USA since the Liverpool-born editor Arthur Wynne introduced them to New York World in 1913). The first Sunday Express one in 1924 was a 7x7 non-cryptic effort that seems rather feeble by current standards; early puzzles also tended to go for densely interlocked grids of checked letters (in the style of the current "smallest, hardest crossword" format) but the familiar modern format and cryptic puzzles rapidly developed, notably via the poet and scholar Edward Powys Mathers (aka Torquemada).
I didn't realise until recently that there's a deal of philosophy behind crossword compilation. Torquemada is remembered as a great exponent and founder of the cryptic format, but many of his clues are imperfect by modern standards of clue-setting. Some were not even cryptic, in the crossword sense, just obscure general knowledge like completing literary quotations ("Chicken-skin, delicate, white, Painted by -- Vanloo").
A further problem relates to the logical basis, an idea codified by Torquemada's successor in 1939, Ximenes (Derrick Somerset Macnutt). Ximenes set the standard for the symmetric grid and the typical density of checked vs. unchecked letters (checked are the ones where words cross), as well as fairness of clues: no misdirection, guesswork, jumps of illogic, or breaching of the separation between the "definition" and "subsidiary indication" that comprise the clue. See Ximenean clueing and More thoughts on Ximenean clueing. Some puzzle setters such as the Guardian's Araucaria go against this convention; the rightness or wrongness of this is a matter of debate in crossword fandom.
If this kind of thing interests you, there's a lot more at Crosswords by Ximenes page (from which some of the above links come). The Fifteen squared weblog is a good stepping stone into the online crossword enthusiasts' circuit.
- Ray
Monday, 9 July 2007
Nostalgia
Current reading: a very nice book of other kinds of British institutions consigned to the dustbin of history: ES Turner's An ABC of Nostalgia.
This compendium of bizarre and largely forgotten fixtures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries includes examples that show nothing much has changed. It tells, for instance, of John Bull magazine, run by the deeply crooked Horatio Bottomley, which ran a word competition called "Bullets" where strangely no-one ever won the top prize: a reminder that Lottery fraud and other competition scams are nothing new.
There was the Children's Newspaper run by the gung-ho and evangelising Arthur Mee. It mentions Crystal Sets (a doomed technology decades ago, but even more so now we're shifting to FM and digital radio, which crystal receivers won't pick up); the Jellygraph (aka hectograph), a still-usable technology for homebrew, maybe samizdat, printing; Lobby Lud (fictionalised as Kolley Kibber in Greene's Brighton Rock , and reinvented as the Daily Mirror's Chalky White); and the scary cautionary stories of Struwwelpeter, online at Project Gutenberg.
My favourite of the bunch is probably the Froth Blowers (AOFB), a charitable drinking organisation founded in 1924 by a grateful patient of the surgeon Sir Alfred Downing Fripp. This is the kind of uncontroversial topic where Wikipedia excels: its article Ancient Order of Froth Blowers is very good, even mentioning the Turner book, with links through to a couple of enthusiast sites, The Friends of the Froth Blowers and the Pub History Society's page. It may well have not been a terrifically healthy pursuit, but it must have a significant source of bonhomie in a period still reeling from World War 1.
- Ray
This compendium of bizarre and largely forgotten fixtures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries includes examples that show nothing much has changed. It tells, for instance, of John Bull magazine, run by the deeply crooked Horatio Bottomley, which ran a word competition called "Bullets" where strangely no-one ever won the top prize: a reminder that Lottery fraud and other competition scams are nothing new.
There was the Children's Newspaper run by the gung-ho and evangelising Arthur Mee. It mentions Crystal Sets (a doomed technology decades ago, but even more so now we're shifting to FM and digital radio, which crystal receivers won't pick up); the Jellygraph (aka hectograph), a still-usable technology for homebrew, maybe samizdat, printing; Lobby Lud (fictionalised as Kolley Kibber in Greene's Brighton Rock , and reinvented as the Daily Mirror's Chalky White); and the scary cautionary stories of Struwwelpeter, online at Project Gutenberg.
My favourite of the bunch is probably the Froth Blowers (AOFB), a charitable drinking organisation founded in 1924 by a grateful patient of the surgeon Sir Alfred Downing Fripp. This is the kind of uncontroversial topic where Wikipedia excels: its article Ancient Order of Froth Blowers is very good, even mentioning the Turner book, with links through to a couple of enthusiast sites, The Friends of the Froth Blowers and the Pub History Society's page. It may well have not been a terrifically healthy pursuit, but it must have a significant source of bonhomie in a period still reeling from World War 1.
- Ray
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